


The Steam Comes To A Head

by genarti



Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Canon Era, Cranky friendship admittedly, Friendship, Gen, Ill-advised 19th century science, Romantics do not make the best neighbors, Science Experiments
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-21
Updated: 2016-03-21
Packaged: 2018-05-28 05:34:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6316669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/genarti/pseuds/genarti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A high-pitched shriek pulled Feuilly from his sleep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Steam Comes To A Head

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Konoto](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Konoto/gifts).



> Written for the 2016 Poisson d'Avril exchange, for the prompt "Hot, steamy action very late at night, and loud enough to wake other people."

A high-pitched shriek pulled Feuilly from his sleep. He found himself on his feet beside the bed, bleary-eyed, heart racing, fumbling in the dark, with no very clear idea of what was going on. For a moment, he wasn't even certain where he was. The shriek -- wordless, high, and inhuman -- subsided into a hiss, and was gone. It left behind a sort of hysterical and surreal doubt: had he imagined that hideous noise?

But he knew that he hadn't. Whatever was going on, it had shocked him awake. And there was laughter and hooting in the other room of Bahorel's unnecessarily large lodgings.

Staying over had seemed like a good idea a few hours ago. He had been exhausted then, warm with affection and more than a little wine, and disinclined to go out into the January cold just so he could sleep at home on a night that was, after all, a weekend anyway. There was a comfortable bed here, freely offered. But now, in the middle of the night, he was remembering all the reasons that he usually left Bahorel's lodgings to Bahorel, and his rotating crowd of Romantic friends.

What had that shriek been? Hideous, if it came from a human throat. Very likely something he should investigate, and lend a hand with, though he couldn't imagine what would have caused a person to make that sound. Or else it might have come from something he had no interest whatsoever in interrupting -- it was always hard to tell, with Bahorel's friends, and it might be anything. There was that laughter, which was probably reassuring, except it made him wonder just how drunk everyone in the room was. Or it might have been something inhuman after all, some whistle, some new musical invention to shock the complacent out of their beds in the middle of the night. Or an animal; perhaps some late arrival with a foreign bird that shrieked like a demon given flesh and feathers.

But it might still have been trouble. He didn't _know_ , truly. And already his memory was softening the sound, blurring its shrillness, turning it into something a human throat might have produced.

Torn between worry and annoyance, Feuilly shuffled towards the door. He wanted to stomp in preemptive irritation, but he didn't trust his memory of rugs and obstacles, and he had no candle. There was likely one on the bedside table, but he had snuffed it out when he went to sleep, and even if he had remembered where Bahorel's fancy matches were, he would have been disinclined to waste one or to grope about for matches and candle. There was dim light around the door, coming from the other room.

What he found when he opened the door, besides enough light to make him wince, was three people, all of whom seemed to be intact and in good health. They were clustered around a device like a small stove crossed with a capstan. A fourth, Jehan Prouvaire, was sprawled on the couch, apparently and improbably fast asleep. Feuilly scrubbed a hand over his face.

It was Bahorel, of course, who noticed him first. "Feuilly!" He had the grace to look faintly sheepish. Feuilly was not at all sure he was willing to be softened by that. "I hoped that wouldn't wake you, but I suppose I can't be surprised it did."

"It would have woken the dead," said one of his companions, a man with a scrubby mustache and a doublet. Feuilly had met him before, but couldn't recall his name at the moment. It was something Irish, or perhaps pseudo-Irish. He was speaking with a dreamy relish that Feuilly might have found endearing at another hour of the day. "Perhaps it did. What's the nearest cemetery? We should go for a walk."

"We can't bring the digester along," the other -- one of the horde of people named Theo, Feuilly remembered now, though he wasn't sure he'd ever been told which last name went with this one -- pointed out. "Not without Jehan, and not while it's lit. Would you have him break his word to a friend?"

"No, I suppose not," the perhaps-Irish fellow allowed, regretfully. "Maybe another time."

"We'll do it properly when we do," Bahorel promised. "Black candles! Eldritch robes! If you're going to try to wake the dead you ought to do it with proper style. Don't just wander down as if you're making a midnight wine run. It's undignified. A corpse deserves better. --Anyway, truly sorry, Feuilly. We had to vent the thing -- I assume you'd rather not have been woken up by it exploding instead -- but I didn't know it would make such a racket."

Feuilly struggled to suppress his irritation. He had chosen to stay here, after all, knowing that Bahorel's house was open to all friends, at all hours, and that many of them brought noise and merry mayhem along with them. But he had thought that if the place was quiet at midnight, it would likely stay that way, which had apparently been foolish. And he had truly thought that if he were sleeping here, Bahorel would have kept any other friends quiet, at least. The fact that Bahorel's apology seemed genuine, and genuinely chagrined, didn't help, except that it made him feel ungracious and thus even more irritated.

He stared at the digester, whatever that was. It squatted over its little drawer of coals, ominously silent.

"What," he asked flatly, "are you even doing with that?"

"Disintegrating art," the perhaps-Irish fellow answered him, promptly and with an air of deep satisfaction.

Feuilly was, for a moment, lost for words.

"It's a steam digester," Bahorel supplied, with a grin. "Joly's -- he didn't feel safe keeping it in the same house as Bossuet's luck, I'm sure I can't imagine why. Jehan borrowed it, with a solemn promise to return it in good condition upon request. It's the invention of -- damn, someone, Combeferre'd remember. Pepin? No, Papin. They use it to make bone-meal and such, apparently. See, it's sealed up tight as a priest's purse. Our good clergy would approve: it has a very inferno to warm its toes. Thus it boils its belly into a hideous roiling of steam, and cooks its food down to a slurry."

Theo whatever-his-last-name-was contributed, "Obviously we weren't going to just make bone-meal. Where's the excitement in that?"

"What would we even do with bone-meal?" Bahorel agreed, while Theo carried on talking over top of him. On the couch, Prouvaire snorted in his sleep, rolled over onto his stomach with the unconscious shuffling-over of someone accustomed to napping on couches and benches, draped one long arm down to the floor, and subsided again.

"But I had a few paintings I wanted to ask Hercule's opinion on -- I hadn't been able to sell them, they're nothing much. I couldn't get them to come out right no matter what I did, so they were a waste of canvas and paint to work on any more, and a waste to keep them lying around. And true beauty lies in ephemerality anyway, isn't that so? We'll cherish the memories of those paintings far more dearly in remembering how short their lives were, before the conflagration reduced them to… well, whatever they're going to be reduced to. Apparently it takes several hours. I can't wait to see. Jehan promised to write about it. It'll be a hideous mess, no doubt, but what gloriously morbid grotesquery, don't you think so?"

Feuilly did not think so. What Feuilly thought was that this was a much greater waste of paint and canvas than a few failed paintings, and a waste of firewood, and most annoyingly a waste of perfectly good sleeping hours, and that he wasn't at all sure Joly would agree that this was a worthy use of his steam digester. Well -- no, Joly probably would, but he'd insist on more precise measurements and notes on the process than anyone in this room seemed inclined to make.

He opened his mouth to say all of this, and then closed it again. "Right," he said instead, wearily. "Do you think you're going to need to vent it again?"

Bahorel waved a hand in negation. "Probably not before dawn. Which is soon enough, anyway, so there you go; it'll wake you for breakfast! --Ha, how you glare. Like a ruffled hen! No, I did mean the apology; we would not have embarked on this with you sleeping a room over if we'd known it'd whistle like a banshee. I do mean that it ought to be another few hours, insofar as I know anything about this, although I grant that's not much, and for your sake and the neighbors' I _will_ prioritize keeping it from blowing us all up in our beds over a little noise. Also, I've got some lambswool you can use to stuff your ears. Want it? I solemnly promise to wake you up for breakfast at whatever time you like. Even though it's a Sunday, and you have no work and I know you're not off to church, and thus you ought to embrace a little decadence and sleep in, if you'll take my advice."

"Unlikely," said Feuilly, with reflexive asperity, and Bahorel cackled. "Ugh. I pity your neighbors. Yes, fine, I'll take the lambswool."

**Author's Note:**

> This was enormous fun -- A+ trolling with the prompt, and I hope I satisfied your steamiest fantasies!
> 
> Papin's steam digester was a real thing, which you can read about [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_digester) and [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Papin) if you care to, and it was basically an early kind of pressure cooker. I have no idea what the odds of Joly actually possessing one were, although I'm going to guess low and thus that there's some kind of wacky story involved to justify it here. I _am_ sure that steam-cooking oil paintings under high pressure is a terrible idea. Whether Joly agrees probably depends on how well these yahoos manage to clean the results out of his expensive machinery.
> 
> Any resemblance Theo and the probably-Irish fellow whose name might or might not be O'Neddy bear to actual 1830s Romantics is a) intentional, and b) in significant part PilferingApples' fault, with a side of blame also going to AMarguerite et al.


End file.
